The Pixie on 15/8/2008 at 23:30

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The Minstrel
A System Shock 2 fan mission by The Pixie

(http://www.box.net/shared/01rae3qoma)

Actually, it is an abandoned fan mission; it is nearly a year since I did anything to it, and I have finally admitted that I am not going to finish it. However, it does, by-and-large work, and I think will give people some enjoyment if they play it through. As far as I know everything works okay, you should be able to complete the mission and it hopefully will not crash. In theory, it should be pretty robust if you try to do things out of order, but it has not well tested at all (though Nameless_Voice and Zygoptera have looked at it and some of their comments have been acted on).

The most significant issues are:

1. System Shock does not work properly on my PC
2. The water is pink (it was frustration with this issue that finished the project)
3. No custom voices. You will have to watch carefully for incoming e-mails and read them to know what is going on. This would be fairly easy to fix if anyone was interested.
4. I had the bright idea of trying to get AIs to patrol through doors, so I had to portalise with the doors open, then build the AI database, then close the doors and portalise again. It kind of worked, but was might tedious when editing.


Installation

I have packaged this as I would a Thief mission. Are there programs equivalent to DarkLoader for System Shock? If not, you will need to copy across the files, carefully noting the directory structure. Note that this WILL overwrite files, so you must back up your existing files (unless your DarkLoader equivalent does that for you).


Just on the off-chance that someone should want to pick up the baton and have a go at finishing this mission, I have included a file minstrel.rtf which documents some of the trap systems. You have my blessing.


WARNING: This mission does include flicking lights.

This mission does not support multi-player (it barely supports single player).


Known issue:

There are two elevators to E deck. Some have reported they are missing, but they work fine on my Win98 and WinXP PCs. There is an alternative route. Also most of the voices have yet to be done.

I have attempted to silence the usual System Shock voices; if you hear Shodan, et al, ignore them, and read the logs and emails instead,


Credits

Custom Model: Nameless_Voice, Christine, IceNine

Custom Scripts: Telliamed, Nameless_Voice

Zygoptera on 16/8/2008 at 01:58

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I had a lot of fun with this, and it's good that it's seen the light of day as it was 99% finished and the only major bug I encountered may well have been the fault of my computer.

icemann on 16/8/2008 at 05:11

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And you could explain away pink water, in a log or something.

For example:
"God damn that Leroy keeps dropping candy into the damn water which results in the entire water going pink after an hour or two. I`m going to frag that guy something but good, some day".

Christine on 16/8/2008 at 08:04

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Great, I was waiting for this mission :thumb:




It runs fine with the latest version of Darkloader (v4.3). :)



I thought this too. But I have the same problem with the AI's in my new mission for Ponterbee Station. All friendly AI's refuses to use doors... :nono:

redrain85 on 16/8/2008 at 13:42

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I was enjoying this new FM, but then suddenly I developed a problem where the framerate slowed to a crawl. At first, I thought it might be because of the fact that ATI Radeon 2000+ series cards are apparently infamous for having slowdowns while using the latest DDFix. (Though, oddly enough, I've rarely if ever noticed any significant slowdowns in Thief 1/2 or SS2. I seem to be lucky.)

I tried quitting and reloading, to no avail. The game also would eventually crash. Which is something I'd never experienced before, either. The more I thought about it, the more I suspected it might be some kind of memory leak occurring, or similar. Slowdowns in games, followed by crashing, are a classic sign of that.

Although I was now crawling along at a snail's pace, and the game would ultimately crash - I kept trying to continue anyway. As I made my way to a certain area . . . lo and behold, there was my answer as to what was causing the problem.

(http://img153.imageshack.us/my.php?image=themanyindeedev3.jpg) http://img153.imageshack.us/img153/4518/themanyindeedev3.th.jpg

:laff:

Sorry, but I thought it was funny. :cheeky: I'm not sure what triggered that to happen. (It seemed as if it started around the time I went into the reactor core, probably too early.) But, unfortunately, it's made the mission unplayable. I guess I'll have to start over and hope that it doesn't happen again.